Sunday, 13 May 2012

Spent 4 days in Busan, Korea and its surroundings and I have mixed feelings about this place. The moment, I was out of the airport ..... there were buildings....tall, taller and even more taller. The city seemed to be surrounded by green hills but I also saw sky scrapers rising behind these hills which rose above the hills.

Googling came to my rescue and I did locate places of my liking but not with any great success. As for my first impressions, you will understand when you see these pictures.

On the next morning I decided to explore the city further with help of city road and railway map and it was a revelation. Spent 5 hours covering 150 Kms, changing rail-routes and levels and walking the busy streets on this week day. In this concrete jungle I met people ready to help me going out of their way. At the starting station when I hesitated at the ticket vending machine, the officer at the Information booth 'walked' me through the whole lesson and 'empowered' me for future such situations. The following picture of paintings by children exhibited permanently in one of the approach passages of the subway station tell a lot.

When I walked around, in the streets, the place seemed to be full of flower beds on the street corners and sides. When I was in the outskirts of the city, there were wild flowers which were breath taking and with refreshing colours. In fact, the first picture below attracted my attention while travelling in a bus because of the specific 'orange' in our National Tri-colour.

But suddenly, it was easy coming across these buildings like these LG washing .... sorry, living machines:

On one of the days, our hosts arranged a sight seeing visit to a near by UNESCO Heritage site of a million year old village of Yang Dong where people still live. That was interesting.

Nearby, there was also something called Millennium Park where I was clicking left and right when my host told me that some of these buildings were built for a movie shooting when I decided to shut-off my camera. One such shooting site :

And then there was this live show where these horseriding archers efficiently hit the bull's eye... almost. See for yourself:

Also see these hand made clay statues in the theme park:

﻿My hotel was just by the sea beach and had a beautiful sight whenever I slid the curtains :

And every place I visit, I must look for the local birds and here are few that I found in my free time :

Of all, I liked this duck the most, who was eager to come and eat out my hands:

And when I was at the airport on way home, I came across this bouquet of national flags of countries in the Expo 2012 held at another city in Korea and there was also our Indian flag.